The Weirdness

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  Billy shoots his arm up between Anton’s, gets a grip on Anton’s ear. He pulls, and Anton grimaces. He tightens his grip and lets himself drop down to his knees, banging one savagely on an outlet strip. Anton, not wanting to lose his ear, goes down right along with him, and the two of them thrash on the floor for a minute, each trying to get a better grip on the other.

  Billy rolls over onto his back, and then realizes this was a mistake: it allows Anton to press him down, planting one hand on his sternum, the other directly on his belly—Billy groans as Anton squashes his liver, or stomach, or whatever soft organs are down there, unprotected by bones. Anton uses Billy to push himself back into an upright position, and, once risen, he begins to kick Billy with his square-toed Fluevogs. Through the pain, Billy wonders whether it hurts worse to be kicked with square-toed shoes than with the normal kind. This thought is disrupted when Anton kicks Billy in the chin, splitting it open, sending a shower of stars through his skull. One more blow like that and he’ll be unconscious.

  Billy rolls onto his stomach, crawls under the nearest desk, drags himself through the maze of Bladed Hyacinth’s cable management system. Anton tries to lunge down, grab his ankles, drag him back out, but Billy’s fear has given him the advantage of speed. He comes out the far side and keeps crawling, heads under a second desk. He gets tangled in a dangling curtain of wires but he needs to keep putting distance between Anton and himself, so he continues to advance, tugging one of the big monitors off the desk. It crashes down onto the small of his back, and he gives up a yip of pain.

  But. He has the space that he needs now. Just a few feet, but that buys him the time to get back to a standing position, to strike his best imitation of a fighting stance.

  Anton Cirrus lumbers toward him, slowly, clumsily, all six chairs in the place somehow in his way.

  Billy makes a fist. He tries to remember whether he’s supposed to put his thumb on the inside or on the outside. Which way keeps you from breaking your thumb? You put it on the inside, right, so it’s protected by the other fingers? Or is it the other fingers that crush it and pulverize it if you do it that way?

  In the end, he isn’t even sure which one he opts for. The second Anton’s head bobs into punching range Billy just pops out at it as hard as he can, fueling the jab with as much animal ferocity as he can muster, with all his frustration and anger—at Anton, at Lucifer, at himself, at the extent of all he’s lost, at just the whole grand stupidity of his life now. He thinks he’s aiming for Anton’s chin but he miscalculates a little bit and gets him instead right in the throat.

  Anton gurgles. His eyes bulge. He performs the arrested fish-gulp you perform when you try to take a breath and fail. He does it again and then he crumples down, grips the edge of a desk with both hands to keep himself from collapsing completely.

  Billy steps back, bumps into the wall of bookshelves, and gets the bright idea that the grand finale here is to grab one of the bookshelves and topple it, burying Anton underneath. It would just look so cool. He turns, gets a pretty good grip on two shelves, and pulls, but it turns out the thing is maybe bolted to the wall or something? Or maybe the shelves in here were just built into the wall directly? He stands on his tiptoes to try to get a better look and when he comes back down, having learned nothing, Anton Cirrus jams the barrel of the gun into the back of Billy’s jawline.

  Billy puts his hands up without being asked.

  “Uh,” he says, breathing hard. “You’re not supposed to use the gun, remember? That was the whole point of this exercise.”

  “Fuck you,” says Anton, his voice coming out all pinched and strangulated-sounding. “Walk.”

  “Where are we going?” Billy asks, as Anton directs him out the door.

  “What,” Anton says. “You think I’m just going to shoot you here in my office? Spray your brains into my bookshelves? No. I’m going to take you out and shoot you on the goddamn street and watch you die in the gutter.”

  “Oh,” Billy says.

  But at that moment he spots someone pushing into the stairwell through the broken glass of the street entrance. A cop? He’d really like to see a cop right about now.

  But it’s not a cop. It’s Denver, with her video camera in its shoulder-mount, its red LED blinking blithely at him.

  “Hey, fuckstick,” Denver shouts up at Anton, from the bottom of the stairwell. “Drop the gun.”

  Anton Cirrus looks down at Denver. “Who the hell are you?” he croaks.

  “Let me tell you,” Denver says. “I’m the one who’s getting really good high-definition footage of you committing assault with a deadly weapon.”

  The pause that this gives Anton is palpable. He takes the gun away from Billy’s head and hesitates. And that’s the moment. Billy turns, and grabs Anton’s shoulders, and throws him down the stairs.

  The gun discharges harmlessly into the ceiling and Billy thinks, just for a moment, of Chekhov. Anton goes down the stairs, all the way down, more or less on his face, banging his elbows and knees against the walls. Denver films his entire descent until he’s lying in a heap at her feet. The gun skitters to a halt next to her, and she pops a folding screwdriver off her belt, deftly lifts it by its trigger guard, and makes it vanish into some holsterlike compartment on her belt.

  Billy gathers up the tire iron and the duffel bag, and hurries down the stairs to meet her. Cirrus is conscious, but dazed, and for one final time Billy contemplates smashing his skull open, reducing his human intelligence into insensate muck. But no. Instead he steps over Cirrus, and he and Denver hurry out onto the street.

  “The Ghoul called me,” she says. “He told me you were coming here. I thought I’d see if—if you were in trouble.”

  “I thought you were still pissed at me,” Billy says.

  “I am,” Denver says. “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t show up. That’s what I keep saying.”

  Billy pauses, and he lets this sink in, and he says, “Thank you.”

  Then he looks both ways for Lucifer, but there’s no sign of him; the two hours aren’t quite up yet. There are no NYPD personnel in sight, either, even though the sidewalk is covered with clear signs of forced entry. The only official on the scene is a Traffic Enforcement Agent, busy printing a ticket for the Trusty Econoline Van.

  “Fuck,” Billy says. “Can’t she see that the hazards are on? That means back in a minute!” But Denver puts her hand on his shoulder, steers him away from the van, directing him instead toward a yellow cab, idling at the curb. Billy stops when he sees it.

  “I told them that I’d get you, and take you to see them,” Denver says.

  “Who?” Billy says.

  “The Ghoul. Anil. They just want to see you, Billy.” She speaks cautiously, as though he may be insane.

  Billy winces. He’d already pretty much assumed that after this afternoon he’d never see any of them again, and while he is still far from coming to terms with that there was at least a way in which he thought it would be easier, emotionally. He’s never really liked long goodbyes and the idea of sitting with them, knowing that it’s the final time, seems grueling.

  He contemplates running. But then he remembers last night, at Barometer, just sitting there and laughing and enjoying everyone’s company. He remembers feeling, even if it was only for fifteen minutes, like everything in his life was going to be okay. He’d like to have that experience one final time. A last toast together before Lucifer sucks him down to Hell. Sad, but it would give him a thing to hold on to, an image he could take with him down to the void. And he sees no prohibition against it; it doesn’t appear to violate his vow, as long as he comes when Lucifer calls. So he lets Denver steer him into the cab, and off they go, into the night.

  They put the gun and the tire iron in the duffel bag, along with the Neko, which floats serenely in the bubble of its shining final seal, and then Billy tries to fill Denver in on everything that’s happened, but she has pieces of the story from Anil and the Ghoul, and she ends up shushing
him so she can tend to his wound. He’s grateful for that, because it allows him to not have to figure out what to do when he gets to the part of the story where he and Elisa fuck one another.

  He leans his head back and lets Denver press a tissue against his chin, watches the streetlights recede through the cab’s rear windshield. It’ll be sad, to say goodbye to all this. This world, with all its weirdness. He will, in the end, miss it.

  After the blood seems to have been stanched, he wonders if he can get away with leaning in for a kiss. He can.

  They kiss for a while, and it’s good.

  And then Billy looks out the window. They’re still in Manhattan. If they were going to Anil’s place, or the Ghoul’s place, or any of their normal haunts they should have crossed over to Brooklyn long ago. And they’re going completely the wrong way to get back to Denver’s place, where they wouldn’t go anyway, ’cause Denver has eleven fucking roommates. It occurs to Billy to ask what he should have asked before he got in the cab.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going to see your dad,” she says.

  “That guy’s not my dad,” he says, beginning to get agitated. “I don’t want to see him. I thought we were going to see Anil—”

  “Anil gave me an address. He said we should meet him there, that there were people there who could help you—”

  “You’re taking me to the Right-Hand Path headquarters,” Billy says, incensed at what suddenly appears to him as her betrayal. “I can’t go there. That’s like the one place I can’t go.”

  “I don’t understand,” she says. “Everybody says that these people can protect you.”

  “They can’t protect me,” Billy says. “And I’m not allowed to let them try.” They cross through an intersection. Billy figures out where they are on the grid; they aren’t far, now, from the Right-Hand Path headquarters. “Hey,” Billy says. He reaches up and raps on the scratched plane of Plexiglas separating him from the cabbie. “Hey, pull over. I have to get out.”

  “Billy,” Denver says. “Just wait.”

  “You don’t understand,” Billy says. He can feel the prohibitions put in place by his vow begin to rise in him, a sort of physical discomfort, a vague, burning itch prickling over him, as though he’s been sprayed with a fine mist of allergens.

  They roll up to HQ. There are signs that Lucifer has been here. Billy remembers Lucifer saying that when he came for Elisa and Jørgen, he came in his full splendor. Billy didn’t think too much about what that meant at the time but he thinks about it now. The building looks like a bomb went off inside it. Scorch marks, some of them fifteen feet high, mar the granite facing. Clean-cut looking men and women with violet hard hats—Right-Hand Path employees, Billy guesses—politely herd pedestrians along a strip of CAUTION tape that cordons off the site. He wonders whether the pedestrians will remember having seen the damage, or if some replacement memory gets installed in their minds before they go.

  The cab pulls over. While Denver fumbles with her credit card Billy grabs the duffel bag, pops the door and hurries out. He’s going to run. Or at least that’s the plan. He looks both ways, trying to decide which way to bolt, but then right there at his side is Barry, the big guy with the serpent facial tattoo who plays Gorbok the Mad.

  “Don’t worry, Billy,” Barry says, in his sweet, high voice. He places a firm hand on Billy’s shoulder. “We got ya.”

  Billy tries to twist free but Barry’s hand stays heavily on his shoulder; it sends some kind of line of force down through his body, rooting his feet to the pavement.

  “Come on now,” Barry says. “Let’s get you upstairs. We’ve regrouped into the secure room, on three.”

  “Fuck you,” Billy says. In response, Barry steps behind him, and twists his arm back between his shoulder blades.

  “Don’t hurt him,” Denver cries, as Barry marches Billy forward. They enter the burnt lobby through a seam in a translucent tarp, stretched across the spot where there used to be a revolving door. Standing in the lobby is Laurent, wearing one of the violet hard hats.

  “Billy!” Laurent says. “Good to see you, very good to see you. We’ve suffered some, ah, unfortunate setbacks today, you can see, the old place looked a little better this morning.” He smiles. “But it’s good to have you back in our court.”

  “I’m not in your court,” Billy says, as they usher him through the lobby.

  “Oh, no, I suppose not, not if we’re speaking about, you know, where your loyalties lie.” They push Billy through a door and begin guiding him up a flight of stairs, with Denver bringing up the rear.

  “We have your friend Anil in the secure room; we got his report of the situation, a layman’s report, but very good nonetheless, very rich in nuances, the fine details, I can understand why the man became a writer. In any case! He seemed to indicate that you might be on the wrong side of some kind of Dark Oath scenario. Which would match, you know, with what happened with Elisa, and the other one, the big gentleman?”

  “Jørgen,” Barry offers, as they cross the second floor landing.

  “Yes! Jørgen! Shame about the two of them; we may be able to get them later, very tricky right now, though, very tricky. So—where was I? Oh, yes, in our court. You say you’re not. And to this we say: Of course! Of course you’re not. Dark Oath, you know, it works that way. You probably see us as the enemy right now, it’s terribly ironic, actually. But in a physical sense? We have you here in the building. Literally in our court. And that’s very, very, very good.”

  “You can’t stop Lucifer,” Billy says. “He came and he took Jørgen and Elisa away from you. He’ll take me, too.”

  “Well,” Laurent says. “We’ll see about that.”

  “Yes,” Billy says. “We will.”

  They emerge into a hallway on the third floor and hustle him toward a pair of black double doors at the far end. As they approach, Billy’s dad, Keith, still in his commando garb, throws the doors open. Billy glares at him as though he’s an enemy.

  “Is he—” Keith says.

  “It’s as we thought,” Laurent says. “Dark Oath.”

  “Shit,” Keith says. He looks like he might rip a phone book in half.

  “Don’t hurt him,” Denver says, hurrying to catch up. “It looks like you’re hurting him.”

  They enter the secure room. Fluorescent lighting, nacreous tile. Various personnel toil busily at racks of arcane-looking equipment. The room resembles a hospital operating suite jammed full of card tables, half-finished cups of coffee, empty take-out containers, and at least one ashtray. Billy sees Anil sitting in a plastic chair, safely out of the way of most of the bustle, in front of a glossy black bank of dormant technology.

  “Seal the room,” Laurent says to Barry. Barry lets go of Billy’s arm finally and begins to do something to the door, something that involves a brilliant light flowing out of his fingertips. It hurts to look at, like an acetylene torch. Billy moves his arm gingerly, rotates it tenderly in its socket.

  “We can undo the Oath,” Laurent says to Keith. “It’ll just—it’ll just take some time.”

  “How long?” Keith says.

  “Two days?” Laurent says.

  “Two days?” Keith says.

  “It’s unfortunate, I agree. But we don’t have the right components and we don’t have the right staff. I could get you this Yoruban guy, a specialist, but he’s in Nigeria, and even if we could get in touch with him—”

  “You can’t keep this room secure for two days,” Keith says, pressing his fingertips against his temples like a character in a commercial for a headache remedy. “Not against the Adversary.”

  “He has a name, you know,” Billy says.

  “Billy,” Laurent snaps. “Why don’t you make yourself comfortable. Go sit over there by the God detector. With your friend.” He waves in Anil’s direction.

  Billy takes one more look at the double doors. They are barely visible behind a gleaming magical glyph. So, okay, fuck it, he probabl
y can’t run. He dismally considers whether he’s going to need to turn into a wolf again and kill everyone in the room just to keep his word. But he feels no special compulsion to do anything other than wait for Lucifer to show up. So he goes, and he sits down in a chair next to Anil. Denver comes and joins them.

  “Hey, man,” Anil says.

  “Hey,” Billy says. He dumps Anton Cirrus’s duffel bag onto the floor.

  Anil puts a hand on Billy’s shoulder. “Listen, man, these guys say that they’re going to help you get out of this. This Oath or whatever it is that you’re under.”

  “But that’s the thing,” Billy says. “I can’t really root for that. I gave my word.”

  Anil gives him an incredulous look. “Are you kidding me?” he says. “Of all the people I know, you’re like the first person to try to weasel out of your obligations. You break promises all the time.”

  Billy turns to look at Denver, in the hopes that she’ll defend his honor, but all she does is give a palms-up gesture.

  “So what the fuck makes this promise so special?” Anil says.

  “I made it to the Devil,” Billy says.

  “Right—which means that it fucks you even worse than the average stupid shit you agree to! And now you’re in a room with people who love you—your friends and your dad and an entire staff of fucking magicians who are working overtime to help you get out of this and you won’t even allow yourself to root for them? No offense, man, but it’s kind of a dick move.”

  “You know what’s a dick move?” Billy says.

  “What,” Anil says.

  But Billy has no retort.

  They sit there in silence for a minute. “All I’m saying,” Anil says eventually, “is just try to let yourself feel a little hope.”

  Billy tries it. And a little light goes on in the wing of himself that he thought had collapsed, in the part of himself that he thought had died.